My best friend had a weird theory today about the polite Asian way of refusal. You know, when you go "Take it lah", and the other party goes "No lah", and you start again with "Take it lah". He tried this out on me and limited it to 5 cycles of repetition to be convinced that I really meant "No lah". His reasoning was that there will be 5 read attempts on a hard disk before a read error is declared.

And this is how my best friend has compared me to a hard disk.